Philip Ingham FRS received his D. Phil from Sussex University, UK, after reading Philosophy, Theology and Genetics at Cambridge University.
He was a post-doctoral fellow at the CNRS LGME in Strasbourg, France and at the ICRF Mill Hill laboratories in London, England, before becoming a junior Group Leader at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge. In 1986 he was appointed Research Scientist at the ICRF Developmental Biology Unit in Oxford and became a Principal Scientist at the ICRF Lincoln's Inn Fields Laboratories in London in 1994. In 1996 was appointed Professor of Developmental Genetics at the University of Sheffield, UK where he established the MRC Centre for Developmental and Biomedical Genetics, of which he is currently Director. He was Chairman of the British Society for Developmental Biology from 1999 to 2004 and has served on the editorial boards of a number of leading journals including Developmental Cell, Genes & Development, Current Biology and the EMBO Journal. He was elected a member of EMBO in 1995, a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences in 2001 a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2002 and an Honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians in 2007. He received the Medal of the Genetics Society of Great Britain in 2005 and the Waddington Medal in 2014. (A YouTube video of Phil’s lecture is available here.)

Tom CARNEY

Tom Carney graduated from the Genetics Department at the University of Adelaide before embarking on a PhD in zebrafish developmental biology in the laboratory of Robert Kelsh at the University of Bath, UK, studying specification of neural crest derivatives. He continued zebrafish research as a postdoctoral fellow with Matthias Hammerschmidt at the Max Planck Institute for Immunobiology in Freiburg, Germany from 2004. Here, he analysed a number of epidermal mutants, elucidating the role of novel extracellular matrix proteins and serine proteases in development. Tom moved to Singapore in October 2008. He is currently co-Principal Investigator with Prof Ingham in the Developmental and Biomedical Genetics Laboratory. His current research focuses on proteolytic pathways in development and disease.

Research in the Ingham Laboratory

The powerful genetics and exquisite embryology of the zebrafish has established this organism as an outstanding non-mammalian model for the analysis of vertebrate embryonic development. The unique experimental advantages of the zebrafish include the optical clarity, accessibility and rapid development of its embryo, the availability of large collections of mutations disrupting essential genes and the relative simplicity of its organ systems. Despite this simplicity, the zebrafish shares many fundamental similarities with other vertebrates; for instance, the patterning of the neural tube, the control of neural and glial differentiation, the specification and differentiation of blood cell lineages and the development and function of the heart. Thus insights from studies in zebrafish can readily be applied directly to higher vertebrates, including humans.

Our research group uses the zebrafish Danio rerio as a model system to study a number of related processes in vertebrate development. In particular, we focus on the role of signaling pathways and the gene regulatory networks (GRNs) that they control. We also use the fish to model human disease related processes such as the inflammatory response and tumour angiogenesis and metastasis. Our approach is based on understanding complex biological processes in the context of the whole organism: we use a range of techniques that take advantage of the properties of the zebrafish, including in vivo imaging, transgenesis, antisense mediated gene knockdown, Zinc finger nuclease mediated targeted gene knock-out, Tandem Affinity Purification of protein complexes and Chromatin Immuno Precipitation (ChIP).

The mechanisms animals employ to generate their tissues and organise constituent cells are highly conserved across species. Within an individual, they are also re-deployed in multiple organs at different times of development, and so understanding the patterning of simple tissues can be informative for more complex tissues of other species.
We wish to understand how the epidermis evolved, develops and patterns. The epidermis forms an essential barrier to external insults and infection in all organisms and thus can be considered a first line of defence. In addition, during limb development, the epidermis folds to forms an important signalling centre called the Apical Ectodermal Ridge (AER). How the epidermis forms this structure and the signalling systems it uses to converse with other cells of the developing limb are unclear.
We are using the unique properties of the zebrafish as an experimental model to analyse epidermal development and disease. The zebrafish epidermis shows high conservation with the basal layer of mammalian epidermis at the cellular and genetic levels. Crucially, the zebrafish allows both forward and reverse genetic analysis, with rapid and efficient overexpression, transgenesis, antisense and gene knockout technologies well established. Large scale mutagenesis screens also continue to yield a wealth of data on gene function in numerous developmental processes. The accessibility and transparency of zebrafish embryos allow processes to be analysed at cellular resolution and we make use of in vivo timelapse imaging, transplantation and lineage analysis to study cellular functions in different genetic contexts.